The Associated Press
CROWN POINT, Ind.- A man sentenced to life in prison for murdering three teens and burying their bodies in a basement tried to hang himself Thursday morning in his jail cell, officials said.
David Maust, 51, used a bed sheet braided into a rope in a suicide attempt and was in critical condition at a hospital, Lake County Sheriff’s Cpl. Mike Higgins said.
Jail staff found a suicide note in which Maust admitted to five killings, Higgins said.
It wasn’t immediately clear to which killings the note referred. Maust pleaded guilty last fall to the deaths of the three teens, and he had pleaded guilty in 1994 to killing a 15-year-old Chicago boy 14 years earlier. Maust had been in and out of mental institutions since an early age.
He agreed to the plea in the teens killings in exchange for the state withdrawing all death penalty requests in the slayings of Michael Dennis, 13, James Raganyi, 16, and Nicholas James, 19, all of Hammond.
Maust, who has said he acted alone, has been jailed since his arrest in December 2003. Police had searched the basement of a Hammond house where Maust rented a second-floor apartment and found freshly poured concrete. At least two bodies were found beneath it, wrapped in plastic and secured with cords and tape.
Police said they suspect Raganyi and Dennis died of suffocation or strangulation and James of a fractured skull.